Cyclopedia Square

This was way more difficult that I thought it would be, but I have conquered. I may be the only person in the world who even cares about doing this, but I'm writing it here so I don't forget. I think it's hard because both the revision control tools, and the conversion tool are all still pretty new and in a state of flux. I finally got it to work using bzr version 0.15.0, git version 1.5.2.3, and tailor version 0.9.29. Both bzr and git are just what I had on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn box that I keep up to date with backports and everything. Tailor version 0.9.26 is in the feisty repositories, but it most definitely didn't work for this. I grabbed the tarball for the latest source from here . You can just untar it and run it right from there. OK, now, once you have tailor, to make this work, you need a tailor configuration file. Just put it anywhere and name it whatever you like. Mine looked a little like this: [DEFAULT] verbose = True patch-name-format = ...

Yegge gave a keynote at OSCON (which I didn't attend even though it's in my own back yard). You can watch it online (scroll down a ways and click on his picture). It's always weird to see and hear someone who's words you've only been reading for a while. He's pretty entertaining in person, but I still like his blog rants better. It was interesting what he said though. I've seen a few blog entries mention branding recently, you know, criticizing names like Haskell and Erlang, and this talk kind of solidified my understanding of how important brand is, even for geeky stuff like programming languages that are meant to be consumed by geeks, who, you would guess would think logically and choose on merits other than name. But they don't. I totally agree that Javascript needs a new name.

Just to show how randomly my thoughts wander at times, I was thinking of a problem in our code at work, and how some particular stuff really needed to be encapsulated into some functions, and I got to thinking about these fancy functional languages that the bloggers have been talking about these days, and I went and found a tutorial on Haskell and started reading it for a bit. At first the purity and cleanliness that it described was quite alluring to me. No side effects. No destructive updates. Beautiful mathematical recursive definitions of functions. This stuff is cool. But wait, how do you do some simple IO? I wondered. The tutorial read my mind and replied: If you are familiar with books on other (imperative) languages, you might be wondering why you haven’t seen many of the standard programs written in tutorials of other languages (like ones that ask the user for his name and then says “Hi” to him by name). The language is smart, and so is the tutorial! Yes! Let...

I confess, not for the first time, that I'm a sucker for the great software philosophers of our time, Paul , Stevie , and Joel , to name a few. Their blog entries and essays are entertaining and thought provoking. However I'm often left unsatisfied because too much of what they advocate just doesn't apply to firmware and embedded systems programming. Sure, high-level languages like lisp and ruby are neat-o, but I'm just not seeing how they are going to help me poll sensors, write memory-mapped registers, and manage real-time tasks better. Where are the embedded systems philosophers and gurus? I stumbled upon a few blogs the other day that might begin to qualify as good embedded systems blogs, and I want to write them down before I lost them. So here's a quick list with some accompanying rough first reactions: EmbeddedGurus.net - actually a collection of 4 interesting bloggers. Needs an aggregated RSS feed. Leibson's Law - looks pretty corporate...

I just learned that if you have some changes in your working tree that you want to get rid of, you don't type 'git revert' like you might guess. No, that's what cvs, subversion, mercurial, and bazaar (to name a few) use revert to mean, but not git. With git, revert is used to undo actual commits. Thankfully, you can undo your revert with another 'git revert', I just learned. So let me repeat to be clear, if you have changes to your working files that you want to abandon, DO NOT do this: git revert HEAD That will undo your last commit. Do this instead: git reset --hard HEAD I'm glad I have that straightened out now. I'm wondering if /etc was really a good place for me to start out playing with git. UPDATE: Nearly two years later and I'm still getting comments on this. I'm glad I've been able to help people out this way. The discussion in the comments is good, and one thing I'd like to point out is that I now always use...

UPDATE : There is a much easier way now : sudo aptitude install etckeeper There, now etc is under revision control and changes are automatically committed with a helpful message after you install new packages. Thanks for the tip, Marcelo! Read on for the original blog entry. --- I put my /etc directory under revision control. I used git. It's awesome. Not that I think I'm going to wholesale copy my /etc from one machine to another, nor because I'm going to branch my /etc directory and spend weeks developing some cool new feature (whatever that would look like...) and then merge it back into the main branch. No, it's mostly because I like the idea of having the big "undo" option that having things under revision control provides. Having to commit changes and write check-in comments when I make changes helps me stay more organized too. It's never good when I go in willy-nilly to make a "quick change" to some configuration file. I r...

I love it when I ponder something quietly to myself, not even uttering my question aloud, and then bump into an answer that same day by seemingly random bouncing around the internet (and let us not speak of the countless hours utterly wasted by bouncing around the internet at other times!). I don't check my feed reader enough to notice comments posted to my family website in a timely manner. I need more than just an RSS feed of recent comments. I need a higher priority interrupt. Email seems about right, but I don't think setting up sendmail (or something like unto it) is what I want. Emails from my home machine would probably be rejected as spam most places anyway. If only my Django powered website could send mail through gmail . And lo, the answer was there before me.